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BOFH Excuse #49:

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Submitted by AlReaud
on Tue, 03/26/2013 - 21:17

Updated: 10/10/2016

If you operate a content management systems (CMS), you're probably familiar with the curse of botnet attacks on the user registration and persistent spammers on comments. These are IP address that are attached to your CMS from China, i.e. the 163.com domain, sending regular, daily spam message updates about Viagra, Cialis, and faux haute couture, sometimes for years on end. Or they continuously try to attack the user registration CAPTCHA, trying to create accounts to do the same or worse, sometimes using inane responses to the CAPTCHA like "TooBad1" through "TooBad257", not really doing any damage but consuming sometimes scarce resources and filling up the logs (to mask other activity sometimes, like database attacks).

This is not a problem specific to any one CMS, and will happen to Drupal, Wordpress, or Joomla. Drupal, however, logs the events as part of core functionality, allowing them to be noticed by the operator. Having dealt with it for well over a year, mostly manually, I found two great modules in the Dupal repository

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Submitted by AlReaud
on Thu, 06/09/2011 - 13:40

During development of a Drupal website, one finds many places where content can be modified and/or presented in different ways. The following is a compilation of tips and tricks related to creating a Drupal website. If you have any you wish to include here, please contact the author at alreaud@happycattech.com for inclusion into this knowledge base.

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Submitted by AlReaud
on Sat, 06/04/2011 - 19:18

The aggregator that comes default with Drupal outputs RSS links that don't open another tab or window. Sometimes it is preferable to have the links open in a new tab or window. That is accomplished by changing the called function in aggregator.module to add the tag target="_blank" to the anchor.

Open modules/aggregator/aggregator.module and change the text in function theme_aggregator_block_item to read: